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Inside Medium's Meltdown

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Re: Inside Medium's Meltdown

#111

Post by ThomPete »

Lazare wrote: post #10
ThomPete wrote: post #9

I think the problem with journalism is that it was never the actual business. What it was, were supporting and adding sophistication to the news industry, but it was never actually central to the business. But the value of news was that it didnt used to be widely available. That was actually what people paid for. The news, not the journalism. And so what we see are all these people in the news industry trying to impr…

Don't forget classified ads either. Historically the rule of thumb is that subscriptions and newsstand sales would more-or-less cover the cost of ink and paper. Ads (and especially classified ads, which were an enormous money spinner) paid for the actual journalism. The moment the internet gutted ad revenue, this stopped being viable. As you say, journalism made the news prestigious, but the news didn't actually make…

I would disagree somehow. You are right that classified makes money. However; news was not freely available as it is today and thus I would say that news was actually something people used to pay for. It was not as lucrative as the classified but it was a major contributor to people actually buying newspapers. They simple did not have another choice if they wanted to know what was going on.

Re: Inside Medium's Meltdown

#112

Post by ThomPete »

ddebernardy wrote: post #87
ThomPete wrote: post #9

I think the problem with journalism is that it was never the actual business. What it was, were supporting and adding sophistication to the news industry, but it was never actually central to the business. But the value of news was that it didnt used to be widely available. That was actually what people paid for. The news, not the journalism. And so what we see are all these people in the news industry trying to impr…

Distribution was also key in the demise. The business model for decades, explained in one of Buffet's shareholder letters, was to become an area's key source of news: Once you're the last newspaper in town, you get to milk the area. That flew out the window when internet came along.

Agree but it was the distribution of news which was valuable. I.e. that not everyone could delivery you news only the newspapers who also did most of the vetting and curation process for you.

Re: Inside Medium's Meltdown

#113

Post by Lazare »

ThomPete wrote: post #111
Lazare wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't forget classified ads either. Historically the rule of thumb is that subscriptions and newsstand sales would more-or-less cover the cost of ink and paper. Ads (and especially classified ads, which were an enormous money spinner) paid for the actual journalism. The moment the internet gutted ad revenue, this stopped being viable. As you say, journalism made the news prestigious, but the news didn't actually make…

I would disagree somehow. You are right that classified makes money. However; news was not freely available as it is today and thus I would say that news was actually something people used to pay for. It was not as lucrative as the classified but it was a major contributor to people actually buying newspapers. They simple did not have another choice if they wanted to know what was going on.

> It was not as lucrative as the classified but it was a major contributor to people actually buying newspapers. They simple did not have another choice if they wanted to know what was going on.

Yes, absolutely. But the point is that while maybe people wouldn't have bought a newspaper that didn't have news, they still weren't willing to pay for the news component. When offered a choice between not having news and paying the actual cost if providing it, people have always opted against paying for it.

An obvious analogy is search engines. It's a useful and valuable service, but so far, users have not been willing to pay for the cost of providing one. Every search engine exists either as a loss making venture or is used as traffic/data generation for something profitable which cross-subsidises it. (Even DDG is profitable only due to their ads.)

Re: Inside Medium's Meltdown

#114

Post by ddebernardy »

ThomPete wrote: post #112
ddebernardy wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Distribution was also key in the demise. The business model for decades, explained in one of Buffet's shareholder letters, was to become an area's key source of news: Once you're the last newspaper in town, you get to milk the area. That flew out the window when internet came along.

Agree but it was the distribution of news which was valuable. I.e. that not everyone could delivery you news only the newspapers who also did most of the vetting and curation process for you.

Exactly. And hence the giant shift: the valuable distribution (aka classifieds) went to specialized sites, and no longer to newspapers. Newspaper business models were screwed online from the onset.

Re: Inside Medium's Meltdown

#115

Post by lkrubner »

This bit:

"And the move infuriated some of Medium's publishers, who were not warned and had bet their livelihoods on Medium and the business model Williams was ditching."

This reminds me very much of when Dave Winer very suddenly shut down weblogs.com. I remember everyone was furious with him then. The rage was personal back then, as the group of people who were weblogging was smaller, and the folks on weblogs.com tended to be the tech elite, many of whom knew Winer personally.

Re: Inside Medium's Meltdown

#116

Post by glitchdout »

geoka9 wrote: post #41
kartickv wrote: post #30

I wanted to create a Medium account but decided otherwise, because of Medium's terrible UX: - Images sometimes don't load, showing a swathe of a single color. In India, latency is much higher than the US, so I open multiple tabs, and start reading only when it finishes loading. Anyone who's trying to optimise should first make sure they don't mess up what has been working for two decades. - I read an interesting blog…

> There's a persistent footer when I scroll, which reduces the visible screen area. That fad is spreading on the web like wildfire. Looks like we (mostly) survived the low contrast epidemy only to get afflicted with the reduced reading space one. Some sites even stick in a huge (as in 1/4 of the screen) persistent header...

It's even worse when it's a sticky header. In those cases when you hit the "Page Down" key the content is covered by the header and you have to press "Up" a few times to read it.

Re: Inside Medium's Meltdown

#117

Post by Chyzwar »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #82
avocade wrote: post #72

The usual sensationalistic headline, but the gist of the story is crystal clear: ads and writing is an inherent and probably impossible-to-solve conflict of interest. The media that won't change their business model during the next couple of years will probably be extremely diminished in quality, and thus influence. Can't wait. (And no, the latest fad of "native advertising", with ads disguising as articles, is not t…

Ads + Writing worked just fine for most of the last century when print was the only option. The dead elephant in the room is the fact that the online ad experience is the most irritating and least useful ad experience in all of history. I use Google to search for A Certain Thing to buy, I buy it, and BAM - I spend the next month getting ads for the same Certain Thing. The ads are completely useless to me, because I'm…

You miss the point. Adds are not to make you buy product. They primary focus is building brand and product awareness. When you next time buy Certain Thing you will subconsciously pick product from the brand you received 6 months of adds. Just check your shopping basket next time in supermarket, most products will be branded well advertised and pretty packaged. Humans are really shallow...

Medium is failing because they are overspending and do not have really a product. Medium should have light adds and option for add-free subscription. It should share some profit with best writers to create more high quality content. Medium should have also agreements with mainstream media to republish some articles. And finally they should have enough machine learning and with twitter that they should own PR.

Re: Inside Medium's Meltdown

#118

Post by mercer »

Baeocystin wrote: post #79
dsplittgerber wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blendle is a solution to a very different problem. Blendle provides unbundling for popular magazines and newspapers, i.e. you can selectively read single articles for It's really well done, but basically does what the iTunes store did for MP3s. What Medium faces is a rather different beast: Trying to reach the holy grail of finding non-advertising funding for journalism (ideally, without a subscription-based model).

I think Blendle's funding model has potential. Of particular importance is how smooth it is to read, and just as easy to say 'nope, not for this one', or not. I've read good things on Medium, but if anything Sturgeon's Law is too generous regarding overall quality. Considering the nature of the beast, I'm not even sure it is possible to change the quality ratio without potentially breaking what Medium is. I'd be happ…

That's what I like about Blendle's model. I'm an infrequent user (Out of all the articles I read, I think I clicked the refund button maybe twice, and that was only because the article was truly terrible.

I can say with certainty that I wouldn't have bothered reading any of these paywalled articles if Blendle didn't exist.

Re: Inside Medium's Meltdown

#119

Post by mercer »

JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #102
Baeocystin wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you heard of https://blendle.com/ ? They brand themselves as 'Spotify for journalism', with a pay-per-article approach, with an instant refund if you don't like the article. I only started using them a couple of days ago, so I don't have any further useful comment, but it seems like a promising approach.

I just don't think there are enough people in America right now with any extra money to spend on articles. The middle class has to worry about paying for food and necessities. Millennials can't afford cable, and people think they will pay for internet articles they are used to getting for free? That business model is doomed from day one.

I'm surrounded by millennials, and most of the pay for Spotify and Netflix, or share an account with family members.

Furthermore, while I'm not 'poor', I'm quite frugal, and yet I've spent quite a bit of money already on Blendle articles.

The biggest hurdle in my case was signing up and connecting my account to a payment system. But once that barrier was crossed, paying somewhere between 10 cents and 1 euro on a article became a (concerning) easy thing to do. I suspect I'm not alone in this.

Re: Inside Medium's Meltdown

#120

Post by mercer »

Traubenfuchs wrote: post #73
kartickv wrote: post #30

I wanted to create a Medium account but decided otherwise, because of Medium's terrible UX: - Images sometimes don't load, showing a swathe of a single color. In India, latency is much higher than the US, so I open multiple tabs, and start reading only when it finishes loading. Anyone who's trying to optimise should first make sure they don't mess up what has been working for two decades. - I read an interesting blog…

They went all out with JavaScript overengineering. On mobile devices I don't want to use it at all.

Is it a speed thing, or mostly a UX thing that bothers you?
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